[nicl] branch is now closed

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 01/09/18 07:28, Samuel Audet wrote:
> Now this is starting to sound like a plan! The point isn't about 
> pointers or arrays, I'm not aware of all the discussions that went 
> into that decision, and this is the point. All decisions related to 
> Panama are made behind closed doors with no input from the community. 
> It's the first time I hear about most of what you've just made public 
> below, so this is a good start. Please keep making this kind of 
> information public. I'm sure it will help make people feel welcome. 
Hi Samuel,
point noted; sometimes emails are just not a suitable medium for 
capturing design decisions. And if there's something we should be doing 
more of, is trying to open up some of the discussions that sometimes we 
have internally (although the ration between open and closed discussion 
is nowhere near what you imagine); there's nothing fundamentally private 
to these communications, think of it as 'laziness' or habit on our part. 
I've been trying to be more upfront about our goals - and have some 
write-ups pushed out _before_ starting to make any significant changes 
to the code base. I guess sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't and 
we need help from all of you to call us out when it doesn't, so thank you.

All this said, I'd say that most of the information is available out 
there - and when it's not, trust me, it's not because of some evil 
machination on our part; writing things up in a decent way takes time 
too, and we have to balance that too - if we still want to have time 
left to push the code changes out :-)

As  a closing comment, at the OpenJDK Committer Workshop [1] very 
similar concerns were raised - and Brian Goetz proposed that some of 
these projects (Valhalla, Panama, Amber) could have some periodic public 
meetup (e.g. via Zoom) where stakeholders could meet architects and 
developers and make sure that their voice is heard. I think this could 
go a long way in helping us understand how to improve our 
communications. As we move closer to an early access state, I think we 
will host one such experimental call (details TBD), so that we can have 
a chat of what will be in the EA, what will not be in it, and what's our 
plan to move the ball forward.

Cheers
Maurizio

[1] - http://openjdk.java.net/workshop